Sharunas Bartas: An Army of One

I came to Vilnius as a young man ten years ago to work with Lithuanian master filmmaker Šarūnas Bartas. I wanted to discover what made Bartas’s films so exceptional, how he achieved his unique balance of visual contemplation and dissolved narration. I lived in a corner of his “studio”, an old wooden house in the middle of the forest, and little by little began to get inside his elusive creative process, but I always felt that I was missing the big picture. In order to put the pieces together, I had to return. —Guillaume Coudray